alt Hacker NewsOwners, not renters: Mozilla's open source AI strategy
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I will be honest. I love that post, makes me want to go see what they are doing.
However, I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.
I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
Like many here on HN, I’m skeptical, also about Mozilla, but the blog post is compelling in its plan plus there’s a new CEO in town.
So I think what we can do is give them the benefit of the doubt and approach this with cautious optimism for now instead of just negativity.
> Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond what most people thought possible — dropping Internet Explorer’s market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web 2.0 era.
Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop.
It’s an interesting choice to frame this initiative around “open AI”. That’s quite a battle to pick right out of the gate.
I'm really not optimistic about this initiative.
- Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic platforms like LangChain / LangGraph.
- Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your competitor, your model will be inferior.
- Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking on EU open source funding & co.
- Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open Source research.
- Newsletter
I like the high level points but unless Mozilla finds revenue from this, are they not doing too much with mostly donation based revenue?
The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made.
Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.
What I care about is the non-existent Firefox strategy, but Mozilla is making me not care to fully embrace ChromeOS Platform.
I think this is a good initiative. Having major software components be part of foundations, rather than single-vendor backed, is always a good thing. TBD if this succeeds or not, but I think they are doing a good thing here.
That sounds admirable. But it doesn't sound like a fast browser.
> So: Are you in?
Nope! Very happy to be entirely out, thanks.
Fuck off Mozilla. You are the browser company, improve the browser! Nobody needs or wants your shitty AI initiatives.
A render css company will try to change the future of ai
Mozilla has stopped being relevant to open source long ago. It's are every bit as corporate as Google these days.
I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc.
That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.